Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

is the United States’ largest media company and newspaper publisher.

Gannett is a publicly traded company based in McLean, Va., the site of USA Today, its flagship paper and by far its largest publication. Gannett in the United States, including the Arizona Republic, Indianapolis Star, Detroit Free Press, Tennessean, Des Moines Register, and Louisville Courier-Journal. Its papers had a of 4.9 million as of 2012. It also owns and several other advertising and media holdings. It bought 20 of those stations when it in 2013.

In August 2014, Gannett its newspaper and broadcast holdings in mid-2015, with the broadcast division taking on the company’s debt and also including CareerBuilder and Cars.com, the latter of which it bought out for $1.8 billion.

Gannett was in Rochester, N.Y., by newspaper owner Frank Gannett. Over the next several decades, Gannett steadily acquired newspapers and broadcast stations, with its most recent major purchase in 2000.

For several decades, Gannett has been known as being among the leaner, more corporate-driven American newspaper publishers. The company has run its papers with , even during . During the late 2000s, Gannett of newspaper employees during a of . Its employment and has fallen off every year since then, including in 2013. The company has been for giving executives large bonuses as they made those cuts. In 2012, its pension plan was reportedly by nearly $1 billion.

Gannett’s financial situation bottomed out in , as its cost-cutting . Gannett’s profit continued to drop slightly in , though its income increased.

Gannett has invested in or bought several digital properties since 2005, including the online ad firm , social media ad firm , online shopping circular , livestreaming video service , local entertainment network , sports blog , and sports aggregation site . In 2010, Gannett , a business consultation firm focused on online marketing. Gannett has an with Yahoo covering all of its publishing and broadcast properties.

In 2012, Gannett to provide content for its local properties. It to centralize editing, design, and production processes in 2014. It also began based on that of USA Today in 2013 and into its other papers the next year.

Paywall

Gannett implemented paywalls across all of its newspaper sites in 2012 and early 2013. The company in February 2012 that the paywall would be a metered model and would cover all of its newspaper websites except USA Today.

The paper was at a handful of papers in early 2012. By June 2012, it had just more than half of its papers and expected the plan to bring in $100 million in by the end of the year. By the end of the and quarters of 2012, Gannett announced significant gains in circulation revenue thanks to the paywalls at 71 of its 80 papers.

By the end of 2013, after Gannett’s paywalls had been fully rolled out, the company’s circulation revenue had flatlined, about the long-term viability of its paywall model.

The Information Center

In 2006, Gannett launched a of its news outlets called . The project marked a companywide shift into digital journalism, emphasizing local news, multimedia journalism and citizen-driven media efforts.

The initiative included the development of multimedia-oriented, office-less “,” , citizen-led , .

Reaction to the project has been somewhat mixed: It initially received , but were . Since the project has been implemented, it occasionally has been criticized for and .

Publish2 is a content-sharing company meant to perform a role similar to traditional syndication networks. Publish2’s first iteration was aimed at helping journalists share content online more easily by aggregating links and posts and creating widgets for news websites. It was similar to social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious, though oriented toward journalists. The…

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